Some Sing, Some Cry

by Ntozake Shange

  “I seek complete elimination. Refuse registration to any Negro applicant.”

  “But why?”

  “The principle. The principle of power. Unless we crush the Negro totally, they will rise to rape our women and murder us in our beds.” Cole had to keep from snorting in his wineglass as the visitor continued, “I say follow Mississippi and extend suffrage to every male in South Carolina—lived in the state for two years, county for one and precinct for four months. And as for the colored,” he said with a snarl, “hit em with a poll tax, and typical niggah crimes: vagrancy, adultery, attempted rape—and you won’t find nary none of em left to vote. Any that sneak through, make em read and write a section of the Constitution, say that blasted Fourteenth Amendment. If that fails, shoot em. Gentlemen, I seek complete separation of the races. Railroads, schools—everything. Fraternization leads to mongrelization and utter degeneracy,” he spat, his one eye following Dora every time she passed.

  “Shall I clear the setting, m’am?” Dora asked politely.

  “Did I ask you to speak?” Mrs. Bonneau said without looking in her direction. Cole leaned back. Tildie glowered at him, ready to pounce. Cole’s delicate hands, so unused to toil, placed his fork and knife across his plate. Dora wordlessly removed it. His soft lips, used to exerting no more energy than persuasion, curled in a half-smile. His ancestors had weathered a century of assault—from the British, from the cotton gin, from the North, from their own niggahs—and now they had to suffer this invasion from this poor white, up-country-come-downtown redneck. “That poses an interesting dilemma, Governor. What you propose would eliminate whites, too. Some of our best families might be denied rights under your new laws. Quiet as it’s kept, there’s scarcely any person of pure Caucasian blood in all of Carolina. Even with your new law, we would still have a Negro majority.”

  Tillman grew red and silent, then wiped the sides of his mustache with the napkin tucked in his collar. “For all practical purposes a person of color would be declared one-eighth or more. The black race is two thousand years behind and they should stay that way. We must eliminate the vote, restrict the fields of labor open to them, and demolish their schools. Every lil nigger in the state going to school and the state paying for it! Plain and simple, it spoils them for work.”

  Tildie’s future father-in-law stirred in his chair. “You just don’t trust free labor, Governor.”

  “Slavery is the ultimate free labor.” Cole chuckled, dabbing his lips with the corner of his napkin. “You wouldn’t let us keep it.”

  The governor glowered. “You find this humorous, son?”

  “The schools would be fine if the colored raised the money themselves,” Tildie interjected, picking bits from her dinner roll.

  “Did just that in Columbia,” Tillman clipped. “Raised all the revenue in the church. Built the school. Then wanted all black teachers. Put white teachers out of a job.”

  Tildie’s eyes rolled up in her head. “Another croquette, Governor?”

  “We need to make sure this district follows suit with the others,” he continued, turning his one cold eye toward the empty dining chair. “I was under the impression that I would have the opportunity to discuss these issues with your guest, who has so unfortunately decided to absent himself from the present company. You assured me he would be here. I consented to attend this affair in the spirit of honorable cooperation and partnership.”

  Cole sighed with the largess of unearned privilege and stood. “May I propose a toast to the partnership at hand? I raise my glass to my fair cousin and to my esteemed former classmate, to this fine new union of North and South in a new decade of prosperity.”

  The old colonel came to from his stupor. “North and South? Who dares mention the North in this house? Fetch my horse!” He turned and blurted to the governor, “How’d you lose your eye? What battle? What field?”

  Tillman’s face flushed scarlet. Tillman had ridden the back of the bloody Red Shirts into the governor’s mansion. The champion spokesman for “the average white man,” he had lorded over those marauding bands that had terrorized Carolina for three decades. Emboldened by his success, he was poised to take his agenda national—looting, shooting, defrauding, and ultimately disenfranchising the nation’s colored citizens en masse. Still, he was sensitive about his absence from the battlefield. “I lost my eye to illness, sir. I did not fight in the war. I fight for the cause now.”

  The doorbell chimed from the hallway, allowing Dora a brief escape. Chickens, cats, bunnies, pigeons. Nimmie, Ginny, Nancy P., and Annie. Lord, just let me finish this day! Polishin’ the silvuh, servin’ drinks, then waitin’ on the table. Now walkin’ to the gate cuz the gateman’s out. They such liars. Ain’t got no gateman. Dora pushed the heavy wrought-iron gate open with both hands and stood, waiting. The carriage passed, the door crested with the state seal. From the carriage window, the same bright blaze of sky that made others stare at her was staring back.

  Miss Matilda Bonneau’s late-arriving dinner guest, Julius Mayfield III, the heir apparent of the political oligarchy of old Carolina, appeared at the door, extended his apology, and left just as abruptly as he had arrived. Tildie was mortified. She realized immediately what her missing guest had already discerned—that Dora May was short for Mayfield.

  Bette’s head bobbed in the breeze. Selling charms on the docks, she had dozed off. In sleep, the warm moist sun became candlelight. Bette could hear chamber music mingled with laughter from the banquet below—violins in the vestibule played a delicate allegro for entry music, while the Tamarind string band played a quick-stepping reel quarter dance in the main room. She was helping her white half-sister prepare for the ball. The notes wound up the spiral stair in an intoxication of harmony and melody, toppling one another as she flew about the room like a firefly. The candlelight became the myriad reflections of a chandelier, jeweled circles of light dancing on the walls. As she cleared the table of dirty china and silver, her tiny fingers just reaching the top, Massa extended his hand, inviting her to dance. Musicians played in the distance, not an orchestra, but two, maybe three trusted accompanists. While Julius twirled the child around and around, the child became a woman, spinning herself at a Juba, the clandestine ring dance practiced among her own. Candlelight to pitch torches deep in the swamp where Lijah-Lah played a new banjar and African Jeremiah pounded a hollowed-out log with flat palms, his fingers commanding her feet to lose themselves to the webbed fury of his song. Juba, Jewel, Jewel. “I can see,” he said, “from how high she rides in your belly that she will be a girl. We will name the child Juliet.” The name became wide dark eyes, encircled by a honey-glazed face, always a steady gaze as Bette suckled her, the mother’s smile broken by the back of a hand cracked against her jaw. “Sell that bastard! The bitch and the bastard, both!”

  Bette stirred from her slumber, the crackling squeal of a seagull startling her back to time. A stevedore, cap in hand, bent down beside her, in obeisance. “Mah Bette. Mauma?”

  “You are troubled, my son.”

  In her waking state, Mah Bette didn’t remember much of her childhood. Snatches of things mostly—a turn of a fiddle in the evening harbor winds, a figure dancing in the movement of the leaves. She didn’t remember much of nothing but a hearty laugh that shook the boards of the floor and, to this day, her chest bones. In her old age, Bette always told her family that she had been purchased. “Mr. Julius seen me at auction in Virginia and brought me to the house. He brought me to the house as a gift to his new wife, who was barely more than a girl herself. Then I were scrubbed, fussed about, gived a little uniform. Harr all curled, a cinnamon doll, I were. Then schooled in service.” Her favorite chore, she said, was to sweep the ceiling of cobwebs with a cloth-covered broom. Monday, the cook, would hoist her onto the mahogany dining table, so that she was big as the grown-ups in the room, on her toes even taller. Cook would give her a warm bath in a tiny tin tub. Then she would warm the bed. She would slip under the Missus’s covers and warm the ro
sewater sheets with her body, for the Missus said the bed iron left the smell of coal in the threads. Her final job was to brush the Missus’s hair, which was thin and straight and fine, not at all like Bette’s, which sprang from her scalp in great heaping coils. Cook called it, “Your crownin’ glory.” The Missus made Cook cover it up. Cook brusquely fussed at the task, jerking Bette’s neck as she adjusted the topknot to sit proper. But by the end of the day, the tie had always slipped off or to the side and Bette’s shock of curls would spill out on their own like wild forest vines. This would infuriate the Missus, who would stomp her foot and hiss, “Git that little niggah lookin’ right!” Cook would laugh and, more gently this time, fix the topknot just so.

  Cook, again fat with child, was proud of the beautiful daughter she had produced, who had earned her entry into the manor house. She was content, even vain, until she saw them dancing, until she saw her master dancing with her child’s feet curled around his shoes. She realized then that she had given birth to her replacement, a tiny chambermaid for his wife and himself. Monday began to beat the child, “I not your mama, you not my child,” then hold her tightly to her breast. “Lawd, what we to do? Somebody ax you anyting, no speak. Nevuh.” When she was delivered of her newborn, Monday tried to run away with her children, but the winter rains came early. The ground was wet and her daughter had grown. The weight of the child in her arms and the one she held fast by the wrist slowed her. She never made it to the shore, to where a boat was hidden. She was caught, branded, then sold off.

  O’Brien burned the sign into her forehead. Bette clutched her own arm above the elbow, the fingers digging into the skin until it bled. Monday fainted backward into the dust. Her head snapped as O’Brien loosed his hand. “Tangled in the naps, it was,” he said. “Damned niggahs.” Her mouth lay open and her knees flopped to either side of her hips like a child sits sometime. Her palms were up, one hand was twitching, the fingers dancing by themselves. Bette thought that she was dead. Already, a fly circled round the blister. It landed on her cheek, cleaned its legs, and tiptoed to the edge of her lip. A faint breath startled it and blew it away. She was not dead, but scarred for good, a crooked x on her brow, a curved t for Tamarind.

  The overseer was still barkin’, still holding the iron in his hand, whirling it round when he spoke. “This is what’ll happen if anyone attempts to steal Mayfield property or destroy it. Let it be a lesson to you all.” Nobody hear him. Nobody lookin’ at him. They all gone way. Standing there, eyes glazed over. Lookin’ to the groun or inna far off way. Not one of em there. All run away only way they could or dared.

  The circle of stunned onlookers began to fade away. Bette, in her confusion, followed a woman who looked like Cook, smelled like her, the starch and suds and flour. The woman turned around and spat.

  Next dawn, a new woman, wearing Cook’s clothes, came into the pantry door where Bette still sat on her palette. The new housekeeper made a clicking sound with her tongue. The child had soiled herself. Moving through the haze of habit and memory, Bette rose and set the table, laid out clothes, emptied slop, brought coffee and chicory, and brushed the Missus’s hair. But there was no one to lift her onto the mantel when she was done.

  Master asked her to dance, instructed the fiddler to play, twirled her around till dizzy. She clung to him. He stooped down and cupped her face in his hands. Through the double image, pale blue-gray eyes framed by golden hair that fell across his forehead, she saw the fractured angles of her own face. “This is not to go outside the house,” he said and kissed her lips and drew her body into his. Bette shuttered at the memory, in longing and in loathing. She went inside herself and found a song, a wordless melody, inventing memories. Purchased she said in 1836 if anyone asked. There was no record to prove her wrong. Sherman had seen to that. Her mother, she said, she did not know, and this was not untrue.

  She never saw Monday after that day. She went out to the quarter where her mother had lain. The shape of the body still showed in the dust, and a two-lined curved trail where she had been dragged away by the heels and thrown in a buckboard. O’Brien said she had been shipped back to the Indies, “To die of a sweet tooth in the sugar fields.” But Bette imagined Monday had escaped again. Disappeared into the wilderness, melted into the emerald green leaves and brown bark of the forest.

  Miscellaneous women attended her then with a rough mechanical coldness. Herbs to soothe, reduce the cramping, stop the bleeding. She learned quickly how to tend herself, and showed a knack for harvesting medicines and herbs. This eased her relationship with the others.

  She did not linger in the past or much contemplate her future. She lived for the present. Monday had sacrificed so that she might live, so she squeezed her joy from every moment. A well-cooked stew, a beautiful morning, the mellow blend of hemp and tobacco and her children—daughters born close together, Elma, Blanche, and Juliet.

  Her children were a source of pride and vengeance. Julius had children by his wife, but three were stillborn. Two died in infancy, one at five. His wife’s reaction was one of denial and hysteria. The Missus hated Tamarind, the isolation, the fevers and mosquitos. The hot heavy air that hung on her clothes, the sea of slaves everywhere, most of them looking like they still tasted of salt. She exhibited such fits of rage that Bette automatically was sent to the laundry when she visited the island estate. Bette hated the laundry, working next to Sabina, the withered old woman who had spat at her as a child.

  When the Missus’s young daughter Rosalie, stricken with the fever, passed at the age of five, the Missus took sick herself and received condolences in her bedchamber. Female guests at the wake marveled in silent awe as the women and children who looked so much like the frail corpse waited so kindly upon them. Between her chores, Bette’s firstborn, Elma, had often played with Rosalie, now so still. She watched the Missus snip a curl from her daughter’s hair and asked Bette if she, too, could part with a lock. Bette’s eyes glazed wide. “Don’t ever let no one have yo’ harr. Else they hold yo’ soul.”

  A veil parted in the Missus’s awareness that day. When she came back from riding, the black mesh netting on her face blew above her eyes as she looked around at the slave children, in particular the child sweeping the veranda. Elma had been crying, missing her playmate. As the Missus mounted the steps, she caught sight of the tear-polished eyes that in the twilight sun were unmistakably the exact same downturned oval shape and color as her husband’s.

  She raised her riding crop and began beating Elma with it. At the wail of her child, Bette flew from the kitchen house and showered the woman with blows from her broom, backed her away like a maddened dog. Max dropped his basket of oysters and ran to separate the two battling women. He held Bette back by the shoulders, shielding her with his body from the Missus, spewing curses and screaming for O’Brien, their chests heaving with mutual fury.

  O’Brien dragged Bette away and, with thoroughness coupling envy, he stripped Bette, bound her wrists, and hoisted her to a tree. Just as he had done the mother, he now beat the daughter. Elma lay crouched beneath the porch, her knees drawn to her chin, chewing on her hair, her body a mass of tics and grunts.

  Julius banished his wife to a second plantation, which he rarely visited. A vast tract of up-country land inherited from her father, it lay on the western frontier of the state near Allendale. He tended the business of his growing land interests and the wounded hearts of both of his ladies. He teased Bette with talk of freedom.

  Both the white wife and the slave wife delivered of a son the winter of 1852, but this time, it was Bette’s child who died. Julius consoled her with words of rekindled love, of apology. “What would have been his fate? It is God’s will,” he said. “For the girls there is a place. The next one we will name Juliet. Our Jewel.” Then he fled Tamarind, rode in the dead of night, driving the carriage with whip and howls, so that when his wife awakened, he could present her with a bouquet of rare orchids to celebrate the birth of his heir.

  Bette could not bel
ieve her child had died. They had not let her see him, touch him. She knew in her heart that her child had been stolen. The grief—all of it bundled together—drove her to the forest of mangroves and the Juba, her feet remembering the attempted escape of her mother years before. She came upon the clandestine ceremony, her soles bleeding, muslin gown rimmed in mud. The bandanna lost to the branches, her braid uncoiled like a snake and languished on her shoulder. Her eyes were wide, darting, mad, seeing too much, too fast. The drums stopped. The black and ebony faces aglow in the flames of pitch torches reflected orange in the forest light. She sank to her knees, her legs splayed to each side like a child, her back caved from the weight of her heart.

  Softly, the rhythm began again. The beat of the gourd drum drawing her body upward. The women drew her slowly to her feet, helping her to stand. Limply, stumbling in a circle dance, she joined in. The song of her mother came upon her. “Jemaya-ahhh-ah-ah-ahhh-ah-ah-ahh-ahh-ahhhh!”

  As she danced, the near-dawn sky suddenly darkened and cracked open. The tears that she could not shed fell from heaven in a torrent. The prayer gatherers scattered as great balls of lightning rolled onto the earthen middens surrounding the clearing. Shango had entered. The supplicants watched her dance a solo in ancient fury, her feet a stuttering whir, her back undulating, when the one who rose up from the salt began to sing. The African, newly named Jeremiah, held her fast as the sorrow burst forth.